Entries Tagged "keys"

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Unredacted U.S. Diplomatic WikiLeaks Cables Published

It looks as if the entire mass of U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks had is available online somewhere. How this came about is a good illustration of how security can go wrong in ways you don’t expect.

Near as I can tell, this is what happened:

  1. In order to send the Guardian the cables, WikiLeaks encrypted them and put them on its website at a hidden URL.
  2. WikiLeaks sent the Guardian the URL.
  3. WikiLeaks sent the Guardian the encryption key.
  4. The Guardian downloaded and decrypted the file.
  5. WikiLeaks removed the file from their server.
  6. Somehow, the encrypted file ends up on BitTorrent. Perhaps someone found the hidden URL, downloaded the file, and then uploaded it to BitTorrent. Perhaps it is the “insurance file.” I don’t know.
  7. The Guardian published a book about WikiLeaks. Thinking the decryption key had no value, it published the key in the book.
  8. A reader used the key from the book to decrypt the archive from BitTorrent, and published the decrypted version: all the U.S. diplomatic cables in unredacted form.

Memo to the Guardian: Publishing encryption keys is almost always a bad idea. Memo to WikiLeaks: Using the same key for the Guardian and for the insurance file—if that’s what you did—was a bad idea.

EDITED TO ADD (9/1): From pp 138-9 of WikiLeaks:

Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper: ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. “That’s the password,” he said. “But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word ‘Diplomatic’ before the word ‘History’. Can you remember that?”

I think we can all agree that that’s a secure encryption key.

EDITED TO ADD (9/1): WikiLeaks says that the Guardian file and the insurance file are not encrypted with the same key. Which brings us back to the question: how did the encrypted Guardian file get loose?

EDITED TO ADD (9/1): Spiegel has the detailed story.

Posted on September 1, 2011 at 12:56 PM • View Comments

Duplicating Physical Keys from Photographs (Sneakey)

In this demonstration, researchers photographed keys from 200 feet away and then made working copies. From the paper:

The access control provided by a physical lock is based on the assumption that the information content of the corresponding key is private—that duplication should require either possession of the key or a priori knowledge of how it was cut. However, the ever-increasing capabilities and prevalence of digital imaging technologies present a fundamental challenge to this privacy assumption. Using modest imaging equipment and standard computer vision algorithms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of physical key teleduplication—extracting a key’s complete and precise bitting code at a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates. We describe our prototype system, Sneakey, and evaluate its effectiveness, in both laboratory and real-world settings, using the most popular residential key types in the U.S.

The design of common keys actually makes this process easier. There are only ten possible positions for each pin, any single key uses only half of those positions, and the positions of adjacent pins are deliberately set far apart.

EDITED TO ADD (7/26): I seem to have written about this in 2009. Apologies.

Posted on July 26, 2011 at 1:28 PM • View Comments

Smuggling Drugs in Unwitting People's Car Trunks

This is clever:

A few miles away across the Rio Grande, the FBI determined that Chavez and Gomez were using lookouts to monitor the SENTRI Express Lane at the border. The lookouts identified “targets”—people with regular commutes who primarily drove Ford vehicles. According to the FBI affidavit, the smugglers would follow their targets and get the vehicle identification number off the car’s dashboard. Then a corrupt locksmith with access to Ford’s vehicle database would make a duplicate key.

Keys in hand, the gang would put drugs in a car at night in Mexico and then pick up their shipment from the parked vehicle the next morning in Texas, authorities say.

This attack works because 1) there’s a database of keys available to lots of people, and 2) both the SENTRI system and the victims are predictable.

Posted on July 25, 2011 at 5:59 AM • View Comments

Physical Key Escrow

This creates far more security risks than it solves:

The city council in Cedar Falls, Iowa has absolutely crossed the line. They voted 6-1 in favor of expanding the use of lock boxes on commercial property. Property owners would be forced to place the keys to their businesses in boxes outside their doors so that firefighters, in that one-in-a-million chance, would have easy access to get inside.

We in the computer security world have been here before, over ten years ago.

Posted on July 14, 2011 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

RSA Security, Inc Hacked

The company, not the algorithm. Here’s the corporate spin.

Our investigation has led us to believe that the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). Our investigation also revealed that the attack resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems. Some of that information is specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products. While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack. We are very actively communicating this situation to RSA customers and providing immediate steps for them to take to strengthen their SecurID implementations.

Here are news articles. The worry is that source code to the company’s SecurID two-factor authentication product was stolen, which would possibly allow hackers to reverse-engineer or otherwise break the system. It’s hard to make any assessments about whether this is possible or likely without knowing 1) how SecurID’s cryptography works, and 2) exactly what was stolen from the company’s servers. We do not know either, and the corporate spin is as short on details as it is long on reassurances.

RSA Data Security, Inc. is probably pretty screwed if SecurID is compromised. Those hardware tokens have no upgrade path, and would have to be replaced. How many of the company’s customers will replace them with competitors’ tokens. Probably a bunch. Hence, it’s in RSA’s best interest for their customers to forget this incident as quickly as possible.

There seems to be two likely scenarios if the attackers have compromised SecurID. One, they are a sophisticated organization who wants the information for a specific purpose. The attackers actually are on RSA’s side in the public-relations spin, and we’re unlikely to see widespread use of this information. Or two, they stole the stuff for conventional criminal purposes and will sell it. In that case, we’re likely to know pretty quickly.

Again, without detailed information—or at least an impartial assessment—it’s impossible to make any recommendations. Security is all about trust, and when trust is lost there is no security. User’s of SecurID trusted RSA Data Security, Inc. to protect the secrets necessary to secure that system. To the extent they did not, the company has lost its customers’ trust.

Posted on March 21, 2011 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Proprietary Encryption in Car Immobilizers Cracked

This shouldn’t be a surprise:

Karsten Nohl’s assessment of dozens of car makes and models found weaknesses in the way immobilisers are integrated with the rest of the car’s electronics.

The immobiliser unit should be connected securely to the vehicle’s electronic engine control unit, using the car’s internal data network. But these networks often use weaker encryption than the immobiliser itself, making them easier to crack.

What’s more, one manufacturer was even found to use the vehicle ID number as the supposedly secret key for this internal network. The VIN, a unique serial number used to identify individual vehicles, is usually printed on the car. “It doesn’t get any weaker than that,” Nohl says.

Posted on December 23, 2010 at 2:02 PM • View Comments

Prepaid Electricity Meter Fraud

New attack:

Criminals across the UK have hacked the new keycard system used to top up pre-payment energy meters and are going door-to-door, dressed as power company workers, selling illegal credit at knock-down prices.

The pre-paid power meters use a key system. Normally people visit a shop to put credit on their key, which they then take home and slot into their meter.

The conmen have cracked the system and can go into people’s houses and put credit on their machine using a hacked key. If they use this, it can be detected the next time they top up their key legitimately.

The system detects the fraud, in that it shows up on audit at a later time. But by then, the criminals are long gone. Clever.

It gets worse:

Conmen sell people the energy credit and then warn them that if they go back to official shops they will end up being charged for the energy they used illegally.

They then trap people and ratchet up the sales price to customers terrified they will have to pay twice ­ something Scottish Power confirmed is starting to happen here in Scotland.

Posted on September 21, 2010 at 1:42 PM • View Comments

Master HDCP Key Cracked

The master key for the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection standard—that’s what encrypts digital television between set-top boxes and digital televisions—has been cracked and published. (Intel confirmed that the key is real.) The ramifications are unclear:

But even if the code is real, it might not immediately foster piracy as the cracking of CSS on DVDs did more than a decade ago. Unlike CSS, which could be implemented in software, HDCP requires custom hardware. The threat model for Hollywood, then, isn’t that a hacker could use the master key to generate a DeCSS-like program for HD, but that shady hardware makers, perhaps in China, might eventually create and sell black-market HDCP cards that would allow the free copying of protected high-def content.

Posted on September 17, 2010 at 1:57 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.